Camp, Part 2 of ?

[parasitegirl]

Thursday

The next morning the camp awoke around 7:00 AM. No, that’s not quite right…Kathryn awoke from unsettling dreams to find herself changed, in her bed, into a gigantic…nope, that’s not it either…The next morning, sane adult creatures reluctantly awoke from restless slumber, the children had been up for hours…from the sounds of it, they awoke early in order to painfully torture each other and to transmogrify into little elephants who existed only to run up and down the steps above our room. The predicted 7:00 uprising was nowhere to be seen, but the schedule clearly stated that yet another uprising was planned for 7am the next morning.

 

After breakfast we got ready for orienteering. In the mountains surrounding the camp there lay many poorly marked trails to navigate and certain points on these trails were signs, each with a different hiragana syllable and number. The main goal of the activity was to find these points using our maps and to collect as many of the syllables, write them down, and, after two hours, turn them in for points. Extra points were given if you found the signs with hiragana and any of the letters spelling B-E-A-R…each group was given a compass and two bells to tie to the lead child and the last child to Make sure to bring the bells to avoid seeing a bear emerge out of the forest…I assume that although we got points for finding the B-E-A-R, finding a real bear would have resulted in a loss of points, life, and future camp insurance.

 

The night before I began to have serious doubts about how good a navigator I would be. I can find my way around a city, but am lousy with nature. I was a Girl Scout at one point, but our Junior Scout troop was once chastised by the national organization of Girl Scouts for not actually earning enough, or any, scouting badges. My fondest scout memory is of our councilors breaking into an official scout lodge because they’d forgotten the keys. My orienteering doubts were further compounded by my ability to get totally lost in the Kiddy Cat Fun Camp facilities. The youth-group facility we stayed in was quite large and was constructed by assembling many identical wings and rooms for meetings and good times (mock Frank Lloyd Write style) in a random and illogical manner (true Escher style.) It’s rather embarrassing to have to say “I have left that folder in my room, and I will gladly go fetch it if you’d only be so kind as to tell me where my room IS.”

 

The first hour went fairly well. I tied bells to children, checked my cell phone for signal, and handed over the maps. The smallest two boys took over and ran us all over the place. We encountered Jimmy’s group a few moments after Jimmy had taken a fall off of a rope bridge and hit a rock with his large head…we felt pretty good in comparison. And then, after one hour, as if on cue, the children became exhausted and disoriented. Three of the girls fell dramatically behind, shuffling their feet slowly and swaying slightly. I started forcing them to drink water regularly as not to pass out, and when we returned to the main road I let them sit…and nothing I would say would motivate them to move again…except “you wanna quit?” The group voted yes, and we headed off to the finish point, one hour early. After the adults got us water they forced us back out into the woods where we got a few more points before the girls started refusing to move again. I highly suspect if we had encountered any bears the girls would have gladly crawled into the bear’s open mouth, happy to no longer have to walk.

 

We gave up and returned to the finish point to sit and wait out the game. The two young boys splintered off to sit and talk and did the two eldest girls, leaving me with four girls, including a small girl named Momoko who found much pleasure in just sitting near me and holding my hand.  The other three girls with me were the same ones who had lagged behind, but while we waited it became clear that these girl had remarkable sources of spare energy which they could conjure up for one thing and one thing alone…the torture of me.

 

Why are these girls smiling? Because they have just tied my shoes together…then they chased me as I hopped around swiping their hats. Why am I not looking at the camera? Because you’d be a fool to take your eye off these little monsters for two seconds!

 

Click here for a bonus photo…my hairstyling squad. 

 

The highest orienteering score? 480 points…us? 140. There was a 100 point gap between us and the next team, but we beat those seven-year-olds! Once again, team Angel saves us from utter humiliation. This was my first clue of how much we were the underachieving team.

 

Then there was lunch. The facilities provided enough of a variety of food that I was always able to score edible food. True, most of the food I ate was white…rice, noodles, bread, with a smattering of green…quite dull, but nourishing. 

 

After lunch most of us foreign females attempted to take a nap. We settled for laying down with out eyes closed and our mouths shut. There was at all times constant high-pitched screaming coming from somewhere outside of our room and when we finally emerged from our room, groggy and unrested, we were surprised by the lack of blood and guts. We’d assumed that such screams had meant someone was being violently disemboweled, but we’d been too tired to do anything about it.

 

My lowest point followed during a massive English writing, story creating, and reading activity that was way beyond any of the student’s abilities. They’d had to “fish” random English words out of a pond, write a creative story using them, and then present it…I later learned that every other group was fucked as well, and that the other councilors cheated like mad, but at the time I just felt defeated. I enlisted the help of the adult Japanese ladies who had planned the game and turned over the responsibility of dealing with it to them (at which point they admitted that I had one of the shyest groups in camp, which meant more work for me in general.) While those adults helped I hid in a toilet stall until I was ready to continue to pretend to be enthusiastic/ a leader/ competent.

 

Coming soon…Part 3! Children with knives, sticker mongers, the meatless battle, and Uno, the rematch.